


dry bones can harm no one

by ohmygodwhy



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, growing up w messy powers and the trauma tht causes, we're back babey!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-10 07:37:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20524358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmygodwhy/pseuds/ohmygodwhy
Summary: He has this realization, sometime between rubbing the palms of his hands raw trying to open the mausoleum door and leaving the house for good, that everybody he sees is going to be dead one day, and he is going to have to continue seeing them anyways.(“It must be freeing, in a way,” Dave says to him one night, tracing the curve of the palm of his hand - his lifeline, Klaus knows, because he got his palm read once, “Knowing what comes after.”)





	dry bones can harm no one

**Author's Note:**

> me ripping off ts elliot at every possible opportunity: it's free real estate  
i haven't gone here in a while but this happened bc thinking abt klaus hours got really intense and then i suddenly had the urge to rewatch the whole show so i wrote this instead bc im a busy bitch who doesn't have 10+ free hours anymore. summer's over :(

_ That corpse you planted last year in your garden, _

_ “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? _

_ “Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?” _

When Klaus is five years old - maybe six, maybe younger, he doesn’t know - he meets this little girl who seems about his age. He’s seen her around before, sometimes playing around the edges of the big backyard, sometimes sitting under one of the trees. No one’s ever mentioned her outright; he’s young enough to think that maybe she’s a neighbor or something, despite the fact that they don’t exactly live in your typical neighborhood. 

The point is, one day he’s out, playing alone, in the little bit of free time they’re given as they get older - fun and games are reserved for noon to one pm on Sundays, his father says. So he’s using his free time to play around outside. He likes being outside. It’s fall, getting colder, but not too cold to go out without a jacket. The leaves are starting to turn green, and the girl is sitting under a tree in the far corner of the yard.

He probably shouldn’t talk to her; Dad wouldn’t want him to. But she’s a kid and he’s a kid and he doesn’t know any other kids besides his siblings. She’s new, and interesting. 

She looks up when he approaches. 

“Hi,” he says, and she seems surprised. He wonders if she has very many friends, and if that’s why she hangs around, all alone, around their yard so much. He knows what that feels like. 

Still, in a small voice, she says: “Hi,” and he smiles.

They sit there talking for the better part of an hour. She tells him that her name is Elise, and that she used to live here, and that there was an accident so she doesn’t live here anymore. She says her mom made her dress for her, and that she wishes her hair would grow out so she could braid it better — it’s short and choppy as it is now, and the ends are all split; she plays with it while she talks, and he follows the movement of her fingers with his eyes. 

“Number Four?” Mom says. He feels a flood of disappointment; his hour must be up, “Who’re you talking to, sweetie?”

He turns his head and blinks up at her. “I made a new friend.”

“Really?” she says with a smile, eyes big and expecting, “Where are they? I’d love to meet them.”

Klaus, five years old and still so small, furrows his eyebrows, confused. “Mom,” he says, “She’s right here.”

He turns back to look at Elise as he gestures, and feels his blood run cold. She had looked up at Mom when he did, and she’s slow to look at Klaus again. She’s slow, and he’s not, and there are burns, deep, dark, ugly looking burns worse than he’s ever seen, running up her neck behind her ear, into her hairline, searing half of it off. Searing her hair off, splitting the ends and never ever growing out. He thinks they might stretch down under her dress. He thinks that maybe he can see bone.

She turns to look at him again, and Klaus does what, looking back on it, he thinks any reasonable person would do right now: he opens his mouth and fucking screams.

_ I remember _

_ Those are pearls that were his eyes. _

_“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”_

Father takes him out of town with him, once, back when Klaus was who knows what age at this point. Said it was for some Advanced Solo Training. He remembers that Luther — and Diego, to some extent — had been all jealous about it, like Dad didn’t pay Luther special attention anyways. He hadn’t wanted to go. And then he had, when he saw they were going all the way to Switzerland, and then he hadn’t again when they showed up at some old, nasty looking old cottage. Or maybe it was a barn. 

Dad had wanted him to talk to… to whatever was there. Whoever was there. It’s important that you find out as much as you can, he remembers him saying, we need to know how clearly they can communicate and how precisely you can relay information.

Klaus barely knew what that meant. He only knows that he was scared, and that he didn’t want to go into the barn. Father had made him go in anyways, Pogo’s comforting hand on his shoulder, and then Dad had put him on a chair and wrapped leather straps around his wrists, his ankles, trapping him there. Holding him there, keeping him there, trapping him.

You have a bad habit of running from things, Number Four.

They had waited there for the better part of an hour before the woman appeared. Walked out of the shadows like something out of one of those horror movies the others liked to watch sometimes, except she was real and he couldn’t cover his eyes like he could on the couch. 

Is something there? Father had asked, his pencil hovering above the paper of his goddamn notebook. What do you see? 

Klaus had barely been able to answer — focus, Number Four, Dad said, and Klaus remembers, he remembers: 

The dead woman presses her mouth up against his ear and screams and screams and doesn’t stop screaming. He thinks he might be screaming with her, screaming at her to go away and to be quiet and to please, please stop or maybe he’s just screaming. He screams himself hoarse, yanking at the thick leather straps until his wrist chafe, and she doesn’t stop. 

“What is it saying, Number Four?” Father might ask, sharp voice nothing but a faint sound. When he doesn’t answer, he hits him once, sharp and quick as a fucking whip, so get his attention. “Pay attention,” he says.

Klaus doesn’t know what the fuck his father wants anymore — he told him to pay attention to the ghosts and now he wants him to pay attention to him instead, he can’t do both at once, he can barely do one of them.

“I don’t know,” he says, he pleads, “She’s just angry.”

“Angry about what?” His father sound so calm and so above and so far away.

“She just—she just wants to get out,” Klaus cries, “She wants to get out, she wants to get out, she wants to get out, get out — l-let me out, let me out! Please let me out! Dad, please let me out!”

Dad does not let him out. He’s down there for thirty more minutes, until Dad either realizes that he’s not getting anything else out of him right now or just gets bored of it. He leaves Pogo to undo the heavy straps on Klaus’ arms, to lead him up and out of the cellar, to help him into the car as Klaus just shakes and shakes. Reginald doesn’t look back once. 

Reginald never seems to look back at any of them. Not Vanya, drawing the shitty umbrella tattoo on her own wrist with black sharpie (he notices once, at dinner, and can’t find it in himself to be annoyed the way Diego or Luther might be; he’d trade his tattooed experience for her sharpie in a heartbeat). Not Klaus, trying to fit his body through the bars of the gate of the graveyard he’s put him in this time. Not Diego - head forced under the water as dad counted, he tells Klaus in his room, when he found out he could hold his breath underwater indefinitely. 

Not Five. He had a painting done for him, when he decided that Five was never coming back. Put him up over the fireplace, quiet and still and docile - passive, passive and subdued in a way he never was in life.

It was never totally clear whether it was a commemoration or a warning. This is what happens when you don’t listen: you get to fuck off forever, and no one will ever know if you’re dead or alive.

Doesn’t sound so bad, honestly. He decides to keep this thought to himself.

Vanya comes to his room after dinner one night, two weeks After The Fact. That’s what he calls it in his mind — cause it’s a Fact that Five left, and it’s Not a fact that he died. Or that he lived. One or the other, and it’s an ironic name, and that’s why he chooses it. Sometimes it’s either laugh or cry, and he did enough crying the first five days. Five days, he thinks, and that’s funny, too. 

Vanya comes to his room, knocks on the door all soft and shuffles in all quiet. If Klaus’ eyes were closed, he might not even know she was there at all. Quiet, quiet Vanya. 

Do you think, she says, and stops, do you think you could…? and she can’t even finish the sentence.

Jesus, Vanya, he says, he snaps, he bites out. Why would I want to know if he died? Why would I want to see him like that? 

Vanya stares at the floor and Klaus feels bad, because he isn’t Diego and he isn’t Luther and he isn’t Dad so he shouldn’t yell at her. But he doesn’t feel sorry enough to change his mind.

If it makes you feel better, he says, I haven’t seen him. Usually, if one of them wants something, I don’t have to conjure them myself. And he hasn’t shown up. So. He’s probably still out there. 

Vanya still doesn’t look up at him, but she does nod. 

Okay, she says, meek and quiet and Vanya. Thanks, Klaus.

Yeah, he says, letting his eyes fall shut, brings his blunt back to his lips. Sorry. 

He doesn’t know why he’s apologizing. He doesn’t think Vanya knows, either. She shuts the door quietly behind her, and Klaus sighs deep and heavy. 

The times in between, when he’s not quite sober but not quite high, either, he keeps his eyes open. He knows that They show up wherever or whoever they’re most attached to, have the most unfinished business with. He thinks that if Five were to haunt anywhere or anyone, it would be here, or their shitheel father. 

Five never shows up; Klaus never sees his stuck-up, genius, so fucking young self roam the halls. He doesn’t know if that makes it better, or worse, the not knowing. He just decides to not decide, and never mentions it to Vanya. He wouldn’t wanna get her quiet, fragile hopes up. 

He doesn’t stop thinking about him; he never looks for him, never ever looks for him, and sometimes he grabs a bite or two of the sandwiches Vanya leaves for him when he ends up in the kitchen at night, and he never tries to conjure him. Never tries to conjure shit, anymore, not even when Dad demands him to, or when Luther does — he loves the guy to death, really, but he’s just… too much for him. So he says no thanks, and watches Number One’s jaw click the way it does when he’s about to go Number One on someone’s ass, and walks away before he can start. 

He decides he wants to keep it a fun little mystery. Fifty-fifty chance. Five-five. He’s a supremely funny person, he thinks to himself, and then decides he wants to light another blunt and watch Project Runway.

(“I never looked for you,” he tells Five, who looks back at him blankly. “When you left. I never looked for you.”

“I wasn’t aware you could look at all,” Five answers cooly. “What with you being high as kite half your life.”

“I could’ve tried. But I didn’t.”

Five’s little baby thirteen year old fingers twitch around his book, “Do you have a point, or are you just trying to piss me off.”

Klaus is feeling incredibly sober, lately, due to the fact that he is incredibly sober lately, so he decides not to fuck around. He doesn’t really know why he brought it up in the first place.

“I dunno. If you were dead, I didn’t wanna see you. And if you weren’t dead,” he shrugs, trailing off, “I didn’t know which would be worse.” 

Five is silent for a long moment. “I’m glad you didn’t look for me,” He says with an air of finality that shouldn’t be as compelling as it is coming from a thirteen year old child. 

For once, Klaus has nothing else to say, and so he doesn’t.) 

_ Here, said she, _

_ Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, _

_ (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) _

An earlier mission, one back before he started going on missions Not Totally Sober. It’s before he falls down the stairs and busts his jaw, before he discovers the beautiful, mind-numbing silence that comes with being doped up on painkillers. 

(I couldn’t see them, he tells Ben when they finally unwire his jaw, and he feels so so amazed that he blinks back the salt in his eyes, because there is no screaming and there is no crying and there is no help me, help me, help me - it’s blissfully fucking silent.

I couldn’t hear them. It’s so quiet, Ben, it’s finally so, so quiet.)

He doesn’t remember if it’s a bank, or maybe some government building - it’s fancy, so it has to be one of the two. There is a Big Bad Criminal that runs into him in the back, where he’s busy Looking For The Stolen… Documents? It was kind of unclear, but he’s looking, and then one of the Bad Guys must’ve gotten past Luther or Diego or whoever’s keeping watch on the back hallway, and he grabs Klaus by the shoulder and jerks him around.

Klaus is only vaguely afraid - they’ve all been trained for this, every minute of every day since they could walk - but he doesn’t have any knives or super strength or magic words (certainly not a vicious tentacle monster), and so he makes due. 

The man seems pretty pissed, and Klaus twists around but he hasn’t had that helpful little growth spurt One and Two have hit quite yet, and his back hits something and there’s a hand around his throat, which he won’t realize he likes until a few years later, thanks, and that’s when he starts to panic. 

He scrambles for whatever he can get, throat spasming - wraps his fingers around something metal and cool (a paperweight?) and swings it forwards.

He hits the man hard, the sound of the metal against his head and the way he drops to the floor like a puppet with cut strings so loud over the quiet hum of the AC system. His bones seem to clatter as he hits the ground, or maybe that’s just Klaus dropping the paperweight. Blood pools underneath him.

He thinks, somewhere in the back of his fourteen year old head, that this might be the first time he’s killed someone this way - this personal, physical way. His hand throbs.

There is a moment where everything is still.

Then, the man rises. His body stays lying still and cooling on the ground. Klaus stumbles back, startled, and drops to his knees. Oh, god.

I’m sorry, he says weakly. 

The man — the ghost, the ghost, he’s something new now — steps closer and then closer, and Klaus scoots back as far as he can as the man screams and screams at him, screams that he killed him, killed him - you fucking killed me. Klaus presses his shaking hands over his ears and closes his eyes and wishes that somebody would help him. 

Nobody ever helps him. He is twenty two and he’s in the back of this fucking night club, right, and it’s all so loud - bad trip, or maybe the shit’s just wearing off, an old, well-known ghostie all mixed up with the new ones; he thinks someone at this club must’ve ran over some kid or something, once upon a time, her entrails all hanging out - and he sits against the wall of the dirty bathroom and presses his hands against his ears and closes his eyes and thinks about how he has not changed one bit.

He never seems to be able to change, not with every just — there. Everything always there. 

Death is something that follows him around like a bad cough. Like a piece of gum stuck to his shoe, but like, permanently. Like a cloud. Like a chronic fucking illness, like a nasty flu, like a broken heart that cracked and never healed over. Sometimes he feels like it sticks to him, and it shows; like people can look at him and see all the shit that hangs over him — that sticks to him. That follows him. 

He knows that when he talks to the dead he is living, and that’s why they follow him around so much — because he is still living and they are not — but he also thinks that maybe, maybe to see them, hear them, understand them, you have to be a little bit dead, too. 

He’s got one foot in either side — a foot in the darkness and the other in a fucking, he doesn’t know, hello kitty roller skate. In a can of shitty, gas station beer. In the sunlight and the changing leaves in the fall. It’s hard to walk with one foot on the ground and one foot in a hole, so he’s always fucking stumbling. High on life or high on the adrenaline rush he feels when he jerks awake at night. 

And he thinks that maybe he should stop and take a breather, because he’s feeling poetic. He always says dumb shit when he’s feeling poetic, open and raw like a nerve. 

He says things like _ Ben, I’m so sorry. _ Or maybe _ I’m so tired. I’m so fucking tired and I’ve been tired for so long I don’t know how to be anything else. _

They’re so loud loud _ loud _ lately, and Ben, he’s really sorry but god jesus fuck they’re loud — somebody has beer, some other crazy fucker has some oxy, and he takes some of both and then he takes some more, some more, and there’s a man with the last shit he ever vomited all down his shirt and his bloodshot eyes and his fucked up teeth, and Klaus can barely hear him over the music but he’s still there. He wonders if that’s what he’ll look like when he dies — if he’ll OD for good in a pile of his own sick with his eyes wide and popping out. If that’s how someone will find him, if that’ll be his last impression left on the world.

God, that would fucking blow.

He takes more anyways, and he doesn’t quite OD but he thinks he might get close, and then he wakes up on a dirty bathroom floor with some girl passed out next to him and another one peering down at him, looking so alive that he almost doesn’t realize that she’s not.

So many dead fucking junkies. God, it’s like seeing into his own future, he thinks, and stands up and splashes water on his face so he doesn’t have to look at how young the dead junkie looks and how fucked up that is.

Hey, she says, you got any H? like she doesn’t even realize she can’t pick up a needle to stick in her arm anymore, like the fact that she’s dead comes second in priority to how much she still wants her fix, even now.

Sorry, he tells her, I don’t like H very much. I can spot you some glass, though. 

Thanks, she says, sounding so fucking grateful, and he presses the palms of his hands against his eyes and laughs so that he doesn’t fucking cry.

_ I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face, _

_ It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said… _

_ The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same. _

Sometimes he thinks he should collect 30 Days Clean chips. Not even necessarily his own — he knows plenty of other people who cycle in and out of rehab like it’s a revolving door. Most of them toss their chips out first chance they get — it makes them feel guilty, or ashamed maybe, the way he did the first few times he walked out and right back into a line of coke — so it’s not like they’d be missing them. 

He wonders if they would sell, and thinks probably not. Probably not in pawn shops. 

But oh, shit, he thinks — he wonders if he could make a profit selling off thirty days to people who don’t actually have thirty but need to Seem like they do. They can get the payoff of gaining the respect or appreciation of whoever wants them to get clean without having to actually Get Clean. Shit, but that’s a genius idea; Klaus truly is a genius. He wonders how much he could charge; wonders if he could get his hand on a sixty or ninety, to charge even more.

He could make an underground business of it: Klaus’ Zero Effort Rehab. Or maybe Get Out Of Jail Free Card — or _ coin _, he supposes. Get Clean Quick. Thirty-for-Thirty. Maybe thirty bucks is a little steep, but it would be a fun name. 

He wishes he could run his genius, innovative business idea by Ben, but he doesn’t wanna give anyone else any ideas — he is, unfortunately, kind of busy at the moment.

With group therapy, in fact, fiddling with a loose string on the hem of his cardigan. He thinks he musta got it from one of those discount, fifty cent boxes the thrift stores leave out every Tuesday, or Monday, or whatever day they’re getting rid of shit that just Won’t sell. It’s light blue, and knitted, and hangs down to the bottom of his thighs when he stands up, and it’s so damn comfortable; it’s like a portable blanket — not that blankets aren’t already portable, he supposes, but it’s blanket he doesn’t have to carry himself. Like a snuggie, but fashionable. Fashion is all the world has, sometimes, he thinks with a sigh. It draws attention to him, and shit, not the kind he likes.

“Is there something you’d like to add, Klaus?” The group leader asks. He thinks her name is Liza, or maybe Nicole. She’s one of the nicer ones. Lotsa empathy in her big brown eyes.

“Oh, no,” he says, apologetic, “Sorry, I was just thinking about the importance of fashion; didn’t mean to interrupt.” 

A few people smile at that, roll their eyes; he does live to please, he thinks. He gestures for whoever was talking to keep on doing it, and leans back in his chair again. 

Ben’s sitting next to him, of course, because this place is nice about letting him keep a chair empty for him, and there’s another one of Them standing across from him, on the other side of the circle. He’s not looking at Klaus for once, eyes locked on the girl in front of him, hands curled around the back of her chair. He doesn’t look angry — just kind of sad. There are track marks up his arms, a few nasty and infected-looking. 

So many dead junkies, he shudders, looking back at whoever’s talking before he can catch the dead fucker’s eye. This is why he hates rehab. 

“Would you like to add anything, Klaus?” the group leader asks again, drawing him out of his tragic lamenting. 

He blinks at her, and wonders how much time has passed. He glances over at Ben, who just shrugs, and so he also shrugs. 

“No,” he says, “I’m alright.” 

“Is your brother there, again?” Nicole-Or-Liza asks delicately, eyes tracking his movements. Klaus almost wants to laugh at how careful she is about it, but he doesn't, because he’s working on not being an asshole to the rehab workers — Ben says they’re just here to help! 

He never really mentions Ben outright — maybe he forgot about it. He doesn’t know how much the people here know about his exciting celebrity past, and how much they even believe about it. 

Klaus smiles at her, and considers, “Yea,” he says, “Is that a problem?”

“Of course not,” she soothes, voice dropping to that tone people talk to kids with. “Is there anything that’s happened in your life that seems to have… brought him back again?”

Ah, he thinks, Miss Nicole is one of those people who think that Ben is like, a Manifestation Of His Trauma, or whatever. 

“Oh, yes of course,” Klaus nods, playing along; he presses a hand against his chest, “It’s just been so hard lately.” 

Liza nods, “Is this about your sister’s new movie?”

That makes Klaus pause. He didn’t know Allison had been in any new recent movies. Granted, he hasn’t had access to a TV for a whole… dubious amount of time, before checking back into rehab. He’s been very busy doing… things.

“This isn’t about a movie,” he says, sure his smile is turning sour, “I just really, really wanna get high.” 

“Cheers to that,” someone says, and Klaus laughs as Nicole/Liza turns to speak to their sorry ass instead. 

Later, he claims the TV in one of the break rooms and checks to see if Allison’s New Movie is playing on any of the channels. It’s not, probably because it like, just came out, so he decides he’s gonna go see it once he busts outta this joint in sixteen days. He’s halfway in, and is so ready to get out that he’s contemplating faking his death.

There are lots of ways he could do it — he has plenty of helpful examples hanging around. There’s one guy who hung himself in the showers using the torn up strips of his blanket, tying it tight around his neck and the other end right next to the shower curtain. He’s hanging there every time Klaus goes to take a shower; he never uses that stall, and winces in sympathy for the people that do. He doesn’t tell anyone about it, ‘cause he doesn’t wanna freak everyone out. He would hate being told that he steps through an invisible dead man every time he showers. 

There’s a girl who OD’d in one of the closets after group therapy, and she wanders around the halls like she’s looking for someone. He never asks who she’s looking for, and she never tells him. She’s a nice one like that. There’s no real way he could leave “evidence” for either of those options, though. 

He could pull a classic Five and just sneak through the window one night. Keep it a fifty-fifty mystery.

He doesn’t end up doing any of these things, because he’s lazy or maybe because the three square meals a day thing isn’t so bad once you get in the habit. 

Group therapy once again, and this time the theme is surviving, whatever that means. 

Surviving abuse, Liza says (her name is Liza, he’s sure this time), surviving assault. Surviving addiction. 

Klaus knows that what happened to them all as kids was fucked up. He had known that before Ben died. It was a forced sort of normalcy at first, but around the time that Klaus started sneaking out and actually, like, interacting with normal people, he realized that most children don’t have posters about How To Gouge Someone’s Eyes Out in their hallways. 

He knows the childhood they lived through was fucked up. He knows about Trauma and Coping Mechanisms and all that fun shit — he’s been to rehab a few times at this point, and he’s been forced into the offices of a few fun therapists who always seem some level of Intrigued to have a former Child Star Slash Soldier in their office. He’s read some books with Ben reading along over his shoulder with tidbits of helpful commentary. He knows all the language, or whatever. 

It’s one thing to know it, and another to talk about it. 

“I survived just fine,” he says, crossing his arms and leaning back in his chair. “I think I’m doing quite well for myself.”

He isn’t sure if he’s joking or not. 

“Your addiction and subsequent overdose is doing well for yourself?”

Oh yeah, he thinks, _ that’s _why he’s in rehab this time. OD in a nightclub. 

He also thinks that Liza is quite blunt. 

“It’s better than staying _ there _,” he says. “Anything is better than staying there. I could be dead, and it would be better than staying there.”

He feels Ben flinch behind him, knows the look on his face like the back of his hand. But Ben doesn’t disagree with him. Not at all.

“Ben thinks so, too,” he says, because it makes Miss Liza flinch as well, eyes dropping uncomfortably to the ground. Klaus understands — having his dead brother say that being dead is better than living in a place like that probably makes it hard to argue. 

They leave it at that, and Liza moves on to the next sorry bastard. 

_ Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not _

_ Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither _

_ Living nor dead, and I knew nothing _

He has this realization, sometime between rubbing the palms of his hands raw trying to open the mausoleum door and leaving the house for good, that everybody he sees is going to be dead one day, and he is going to have to continue seeing them anyways.

It’s not some big dramatic moment that has him reeling, or anything, not like killing the Big Bad Bank Robber and watching his ghost rise from his dead body. It just hits him one day, when they’re driving home from a talk show and he sees a dead bicyclist on the side of a busy street. That poor bastard was alive once, and now he’s not. He’s not the same as he was before, because now he’s dead and nothing can change that. The man on the talk-show will be wandering around someday, and so will the man driving this car and so will all the siblings in it with him.

Someday, he will be afraid of his dead siblings the way he’s afraid the dead strangers he sees everyday.

Klaus doesn’t fear death the way most people do - it’s not a fear of the unknown type of thing. He fears it because he knows exactly what comes next - and he doesn’t fear it for himself, really; he’s not afraid of dying. He’s afraid of waking up and seeing Diego or Ben or Allison the way he sees all the Others - afraid that they won’t be them anymore and he’ll have to know that and see that for the rest of fucking forever. 

He knows it will happen, eventually; everybody he sees will end up like everyone Else he sees, no matter how kind or beautiful or good they are. He doesn’t know what happens to all the nice ones; maybe he can only see the Bad. The angry, the vengeful, the ones who have Unfinished Business.

(“You died in nineteen twenty-fucking-two!” he tries to tell one lady who’s really pissed about being written out of a will or some shit, “All the people you want revenge on are dead, too!”

He writes down what she says, anyways, peels back the wallpaper so he can get it all down, so he can get everyone’s shit down and out of the way.

He scribbles and scribbles whatever he can get out, hand moving too fast for his head — it was Christmas Eve, the woman in the bonnet says, and the snow was so clean, white like powder, like flour — no, sugar, sugar. It’s so cold (someone else, something else, she’s small and shivering) and I’m so, so lonely. Tais-toi, you’re being too loud. Je suis fini, fini, direz mon— I can’t listen, you’re all being too loud. 

Wait, he whispers, just. Wait a sec. For one miraculous moment, everything is quiet; just long enough for him to peel back more wallpaper. Push himself further up the bed and onto his knees to reach, pencil against the wall like it’s moving by itself. 

Eighteen-eighty-eight, spring and solitude and — danke, merci, pourquoi vous n’aidez jamais, jamais, jamais; it’s usually so dark, but it’s so bright here. 

There are some words that he doesn’t know, languages he doesn’t understand. But he has to get it all out, get all the words out of his head before they overwhelm him, before they fill him up and take him over and bury themselves in him and never leave. He needs them to leave. 

Eventually, he runs out of words and he runs out of space in this corner. Pulling back anymore wallpaper might destroy the whole thing, and he can’t have that. His father holds properness (is properness a word?) in high, high regard. Higher than he’s ever held any of them. 

He lets his pencil roll out of his fingers and across the floor, and slumps back against his pillows. He’ll be one of these voices someday; nobody will do him the courtesy of writing down what he has to say.)

He knows that everyone he meets will end up like all the creepy motherfuckers he’s seen since he knew what seeing fucking was - or like, knew how to process it? Dad said he never knew why Klaus cried so much as a child - said Klaus would spout “nonsense” about a man with no eyes in the corner of his room - until he dug up an old newspaper about a man who gouged his own eyes out near the academy grounds. Fun shit. 

It’s not something he thinks about; it’s just something he knows. He’s known it since he met little fucking Elise. He’s known it since he learned to tell the difference. 

When he meets Dave, that bone-deep part of him knows that Dave is going to die someday. That stupid, romantic ass part of him refused to know that - thought that he would die first, that Klaus would die first, or maybe they would both grown old and die together. And if he stayed here, with Dave, he wouldn’t ever have to see his siblings’ ghosts, either - they hadn’t even been _ born _yet, let alone died!

Dave wouldn’t end up like every other dead bastard Klaus has lived though, because Dave wasn’t like them. He was too good, and Klaus refused to think about seeing him like that - he wouldn’t die first, Klaus would go before he ever could, and he knows that that it would make Dave sad for a while, but it would be better. And it wouldn’t have to be now - it’s a long way away, the day where either of them will have to die.

“It must be freeing, in a way,” Dave says to him one night, tracing the curve of the palm of his hand - his lifeline, Klaus knows, because he got his palm read once. The lady who did it said he was meant to fall in love exactly two times - drugs, and Dave, Klaus has decided. He can’t tell if that’s sad, or funny, but he thinks it’s the truth. “Knowing what comes after.”

“I guess so,” Klaus sighs, “I think it just makes me wanna die even less.”

“Then wait a while,” Dave answers, like it was all Klaus’ choice when he was gonna live and when he was gonna die. Always put the power in his hands, like Klaus was responsible enough to handle it. 

Dave makes him feel responsible - or like he could be responsible. Like he could be worth the effort it takes to know him, to understand him. Dave knows him in a way Klaus never thought anyone would ever _ want _ to know him, and still wants him anyways, even after he knows all the shit that comes with it. He treats him like he’s competent, somehow, and like he’s his equal. Not his customer or his junkie fling or his useless brother - Klaus is his equal. Dave won’t let it be any other way. 

Dave tells him that sometimes, he thought that Klaus must’ve been sent down from heaven, just for him. That he was something supernatural, something divine. The supernatural part makes sense, Klaus tells him, the divine half makes him laugh. 

Dave tells him shut up, let me finish, and then tells Klaus that he is not either of those things, he is not supernatural or divine and he was not sent down from heaven - you’re just you, Dave says, tracing the lifeline on his palm, and that’s a thousand times better. 

Klaus tells him he’s fucking crazy - crazier than me, and I lead us through minefields because dead people tell me where to step. 

And you save our lives every time, Dave counters, which wasn’t the point, but Klaus will take it.

They are their division's best kept secret, he and Dave. Dave has the best kept space in Klaus’ pathetic little heart, big enough that fuck yeah, he’ll stick it out throught the Vietnam War if it means they get to retire to some farm somewhere someday, and yes, he’ll get as close to sober as he can out here if it means his head is clear enough that he doesn’t blow any of his fellow soldiers’ brains out by accident. 

Klaus thinks he might do just about anything for him; he thinks maybe that should scare him, but it doesn’t.

Dave is, like, the second of the two times his hands say he’s meant to fall in love. He’s the best, and he’s the last, and, like everyone else who has ever been alive, he dies. 

Unfortunately, Klaus does not die first.

**Author's Note:**

> i have a long ass shift tomorrow morning and still decided this was more important bc im a clown.....comment to get me thru it
> 
> title and italics from "the waste land" by ts elliot


End file.
